How Trisha Okubo Turned a Layoff into a Jewelry Brand Worn 24/7

Most people dread getting laid off. Trisha Okubo used it to build Maison Miru, a jewelry company known for earrings so comfortable you can sleep in them. No venture capital. No fashion industry connections. Just a Stanford-trained engineer who spotted a gap in the market that nobody else was filling.

Her story is a blueprint for turning technical skills into a consumer brand — and for building a business that grows through reinvested profits rather than outside funding.

From Silicon Valley to Jewelry Design

Okubo grew up in Silicon Valley. Her mother was one of the valley's first female engineers, working in aerospace while navigating discrimination that was even more overt in that era. That background gave Okubo both a technical mindset and a deep awareness of what it feels like to be an outsider.

She followed a conventional tech path at first. She became the Global Product Manager at eBay Fashion and later managed eBay's U.S. homepage. On paper, the career was working. In reality, she was living a double life — studying fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles during evenings and weekends while holding down her product management role during the day.

When she was laid off from a tech position in London, the severance became seed money. Instead of scrambling for the next product manager role, she used her "garden leave" to explore what she actually wanted to build. Jewelry design won.

Founding Maison Miru in 2016

The name itself tells you about the founder's approach. "Maison" is French for "house." "Miru" is the Japanese word for "to see." The combination reflects Okubo's bicultural heritage and her obsession with attention to detail — a house where things are seen clearly.

What Okubo saw clearly was a pricing gap in the jewelry market. Fast fashion jewelry was cheap but disposable. Designer jewelry was beautiful but prohibitively expensive. There was very little in between — accessible pieces made with quality materials that you could wear every day without worrying about them falling apart or turning your skin green.

She launched Maison Miru as a direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand, using the same product thinking that had served her at eBay. Every piece was designed to work as part of a coordinated system — what she calls a "palette" concept — so customers could mix pieces without worrying about whether they matched. This reduced decision anxiety and increased average order values, because each purchase naturally led to complementary ones.

The Nap Earring Breakthrough

The product that put Maison Miru on the map was deceptively simple: earrings with flat backs.

Traditional earring backs poke into your skin when you lie down. Anyone who has fallen asleep wearing earrings knows the discomfort. Okubo heard this complaint repeatedly from the piercing community — people who had multiple ear piercings and wanted to leave their jewelry in at all times.

Her solution was the "nap earring," designed with the flat-back posts typically used for cartilage piercings instead of conventional butterfly or push-back closures. The result was an earring comfortable enough to wear 24/7, including while sleeping.

This was not a massive technical innovation. Flat-back posts already existed. But Okubo did something that engineers do well and fashion designers often overlook: she listened to a user pain point and solved it with existing technology applied in a new context. The product-market fit was immediate.

The nap earrings went viral. Not through paid advertising campaigns or influencer deals, but through word of mouth from people who genuinely loved wearing them. When your product solves a real problem, your customers become your marketing department.

Bootstrapping Through Reinvestment

Okubo never took outside funding. Instead, she followed a disciplined reinvestment strategy — every dollar of profit went back into the business. New materials. Better manufacturing. Expanded product lines. The approach meant slower growth than a venture-backed competitor might achieve, but it also meant she retained full ownership and creative control.

This bootstrapping discipline required something that many first-time founders struggle with: a clear understanding of where money was coming from and where it was going. Okubo used financial dashboards to monitor cash flow in real time, tracking which products generated the most revenue and which held too much capital in inventory.

One critical insight came from examining her inventory holding costs. She discovered that older designs were tying up cash that could be deployed into new, higher-performing products. The data led her to retire underperforming SKUs — a decision that freed up working capital and improved margins.

This is the kind of decision that separates businesses that survive from businesses that scale. It requires honest financial visibility, not gut feeling.

The Engineering Mindset in Consumer Products

What makes Okubo's approach distinctive is how she applies systems thinking to a traditionally intuition-driven industry. Her product line operates like a modular system. Each piece is designed to work independently but also to integrate seamlessly with other pieces in the collection. This is software architecture thinking applied to physical products.

The benefits are practical:

• For the customer: Less decision fatigue. Buy any piece and it works with what you already own.
• For the business: Higher lifetime customer value. Each purchase creates a natural pathway to the next one.
• For operations: Simpler inventory management. Modular components share materials and manufacturing processes.

This systematic approach extends to materials. Okubo committed to converting 100% of her collection to "performance metals" — medical-grade titanium and similar hypoallergenic materials. The move addressed both a customer pain point (skin sensitivity) and a sustainability goal (performance metals last longer and stay out of landfills).

She reinforced this commitment through initiatives like the Earth Day Earring Exchange, where customers could trade in tarnished jewelry from any brand for new Maison Miru pieces. It was simultaneously a sustainability program, a customer acquisition tool, and a brand statement.

Inclusivity as Business Strategy

Okubo's experience as someone who felt like an outsider — biracial, straddling tech and fashion, culturally between multiple worlds — shaped Maison Miru's brand identity. The tagline "for her, for him, for them, for everyone" is not just marketing language. It reflects a genuine market positioning decision.

By designing gender-neutral pieces in a wide range of styles, Maison Miru expanded its addressable market beyond the traditional women's jewelry category. This is a business decision as much as a values decision. A brand that serves everyone has a larger total addressable market than one that serves only one demographic.

The inclusive positioning also creates stronger brand loyalty. Customers who feel seen by a brand become advocates. In an era where consumer brands live and die by organic social media engagement, that advocacy is worth more than any advertising budget.

Lessons for Bootstrapped Founders

Okubo's journey offers several transferable principles for anyone building a product business without outside funding.

Solve a Real Problem

The nap earring succeeded because it addressed genuine physical discomfort. Not a hypothetical need. Not a problem manufactured by marketing. A real thing that real people experienced daily. The best product ideas come from paying close attention to complaints that existing products ignore.

Use Your Non-Traditional Background as an Advantage

Okubo did not have fashion industry credentials. She had product management experience from tech. That turned out to be more valuable — she thought in systems, user journeys, and data-driven iteration. Whatever your background, the skills you bring from outside an industry are often more valuable than the skills insiders take for granted.

Reinvest Profits Deliberately

Bootstrapping does not mean growing slowly by default. It means making intentional decisions about where every dollar goes. Okubo's willingness to retire underperforming products and redirect capital into winners is the kind of discipline that turns a lifestyle business into a growing brand.

Build Products as Systems

The palette concept — where every piece works with every other piece — creates compounding value. Each new product strengthens the existing collection rather than competing with it. This is modular thinking, and it works in any product category.

Let Your Customers Market for You

Maison Miru's growth came primarily through organic word of mouth. When your product genuinely solves a problem, satisfied customers share it voluntarily. This is cheaper and more credible than paid acquisition, but it only works if the product actually delivers.

The Financial Foundation of Creative Businesses

Okubo's ability to bootstrap Maison Miru rested on one unglamorous skill: financial clarity. She knew her numbers. She tracked inventory costs, monitored cash flow in real time, and made data-driven decisions about which products to keep and which to retire.

For any founder building a product business — whether jewelry, software, or anything in between — that financial visibility is not optional. It is the difference between making strategic reinvestment decisions and running out of cash because you did not notice a problem until it was too late.

Build Your Financial Foundation

Whether you are bootstrapping a consumer brand or managing freelance income, clear financial records are the foundation of smart business decisions. Beancount.io offers plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — version-controlled, programmable, and built for people who want to understand their numbers, not just file them. Start for free and build the financial clarity your business needs to grow.